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Date March 21 2003
Type Interview
Source Observer Magazine
Title Gold rush
Country UK
Journalist/Photographer Miranda Sawyer
Text Whether she's milking Jersey cows at art school, bringing Bolan and Dietrich to life on stage, or touring with Tricky, Alison Goldfrapp is determined to do it her way. Miranda Sawyer meets the former glue-sniffing convent girl who is fast becoming Britain's only 24ct diva.

It's odd that Alison Goldfrapp is so anonymous.
By rights, she should be straddling music like a jack-booted, frilly-knickered Wonder Woman, simultaneously chastising the world for worshipping Heat-seeking eager-to-please celebrity and giving it a guilty lump in its trousers. Branded 'the most fashionable woman in pop', Alison, and her band, Goldfrapp, have been nominated for Mercurys and Brits, their music has been used in phone ads, she's appeared in numerous magazines and her angelic features are currently plastered across the country in a poster promoting 'Black Cherry', their last single. Yet the world hasn't quite woken up to her charms. This is possibly because the world has problems spotting her.

'No one ever recognises me,' she says. 'Everyone says, "You don't look like your pictures."'

The off-duty Alison isn't wrapped in sensible rollnecks and spectacles - not quite - but, disappointingly, she doesn't live her life playing with nipple-tassled peepshow girls ('Train') nor waltzing with people with wolves' heads ('Strict Machine'), nor riding a roller coaster through a selection of vaginas ('Twist'). She's not stalking the floor in military skimpies and silver shoes. She's sipping a nice dry white wine in the restaurant at the French House, in Soho, dressed like a normal human. Oh well.

In jeans, bomber and sweatshirt, Alison appears fragile, small (about 5ft 3in), with two-tone Shirley Temple curls around a heart-shaped face. Her eyes are enormous. She'd look like a doll if her mouth didn't have that don't-mess line when she's not laughing. Luckily, she laughs a lot - at the moment, at the owner of the French House. 'We booked the table in the corner,' she grins, 'but he wants to sit there. I'm not Kylie yet.'

Her jollity is a relief: she has a reputation as a madam. She used to work with the scariest man in pop, Tricky, singing on 'Pumpkin', from his Maxinquaye album, but they rowed on tour: 'He can be frightening, but I give as good as I get.' On stage with Goldfrapp, she once lost her temper with a photographer: she bashed him over the head with her mic. And she's notoriously impatient with journalists.

'Well, I'm quite shy, really,' she says, 'and I'm sensitive, and when people ask me a dodgy question, I'd be like, "What do you fucking want to know about that for? Shut up." I shut off and get defensive. I've only just started to find my feet more - about what it is that I'm doing and how I'm going to do it. I've started to relax more. But I'm not a popette. I'm not going to smile when people want me to smile.'

We know she's not Kylie: she pleases no one but herself. Friendly, in sensible mufti - so far, so reputation busting. But the real surprise is how dreamy Alison is: she seems away with the fairies. It's like her head is partly elsewhere at all times, thinking of 'going husky sleighing, with all these dogs, and ting-ting-ting through woodland, like Dr Zhivago'; 'having houses in loads of different countries'; 'having different lives, like being a hermit, or eating and drinking all day in a house with my friends'. That's a fantasy? 'Well I'm not very good at cooking, and I'm away all the time, and I like transient living. I get really itchy feet if I stay in one place.

I crave home, and at the same time it makes me feel claustrophobic.' She's just bought a big house in Bath, 'to work in and run away to', but she considers London her base - except that, having been forced out of her rented flat by threatening neighbours, she no longer has a capital address, other than her friends' sofas.

So, in lieu of sleighing, she's going on a British tour, pulled by a different set of old dogs - Goldfrapp are supporting Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon is a big admirer of Goldfrapp and has written fan letters - well, emails - to Alison. She inspires a certain type of fan, she says: either overly sincere - 'I wish all the best for you, your friends and your family,' on lined paper - or 'pervy, where they highlight certain words in felt-tip pen and are hilariously Carry On - "Ooh, spanky spanky!"' Simon Le Bon, luckily, is neither. There's also Moby, who cites Goldfrapp as his absolute favourite band, and Chicks on Speed, who adore them, too.

Those who love Goldfrapp do so devotedly: the band have a particularly fervent gay following, perhaps because of the theatricality and emotion and dressing up that twists through and around their songs. Alison, and her partner in pop Will Gregory, move from orchestrated, ethereal perfection on Felt Mountain to Black Cherry's glam rock electro sex, a sideways leap, conjoined by the loucheness of production and Alison's silvery pure vocals. Her lyrics describe smutty lust for the boy who works on the dodgems and the pull of repressiveness - 'I love uniforms,' she says. 'The rigidity of them. On the Eurostar now, the staff have a choice of what they can wear... that's not what it's about, is it?'

Goldfrapp, more than most groups, are a visual entity, telling stories and creating atmospheres through their videos, stage shows, even their website. Alison says she can't separate the look from music: 'It's all a dramatisation of something personal.' A Goldfrapp gig is certainly an experience: often, a weirdly reverent one at the start, with a rapt audience quietly swooning to Alison's vocal contortions, thigh-high boots and air hostess cap, goggling at the backing members in antlers. By the end, when the crowd has given itself up to stomp-along disco and dirty sex atmos, things can get wild: Weimar Republic cabaret performed by Little Red Riding Hood, Marc Bolan seducing Marlene Dietrich in stack heels.

Goldfrapp always offer something classical, sexual, dramatic; an altogether grandstanding performance compared with your usual indie sweatathon.

Alison tried her hand at performance art in her twenties. Infamously, at Middlesex Art School, she hired a Jersey cow and milked it, while yodelling, outside the school foyer: 'I got very high marks.' Despite such dabblings, she always knew that she wanted to make music. 'In a very slow way, I found my path. Even now, I think, "If I can't do it my way, I'd rather not do it."'

Her dad, Nick, whom she takes after, was artistically inclined, though he worked in advertising and, later, for charity. He wrote poetry and painted and insisted that Alison and her five much older siblings listened to classical music and discussed it afterwards. Nick, a passionate romantic from an upper-middle-class background, flouted his family's wishes by marrying Isabella, known as Pat, a nurse. Alison found a print given by her dad to her mum when they first met, with 'really over-the-top poetry on the back - "We'll prove them all wrong, you are the one." It's lovely.'

Nick and Pat got together during the Second World War (he was very ill, she nursed him), which makes me dubious about Alison's insistence that she was born in 1970, even if her eldest brother is 20 years older than her, as she says.

From her reference points and taste, I'm convinced she's my age (37), if not a year older - no one born after 1967 would have had a picture of David Cassidy on their bedroom wall. Alison did: the only straightforwardly girlish part of a room she painted entirely red. One of her dad's clients was Japanese, and he bought Alison a doll with a geisha costume and white face. Alison loved it so much that she turned her whole room into its shrine, daubed everywhere scarlet and hung a Chinese lantern in the centre. 'I thought that China and Japan were the same place.' This is very Alison: obsessiveness leading to all-encompassing atmosphere.

Alison was brought up in Alton, in the Hampshire countryside, and for a long time her childhood was idyllic. At eight, she was sent to convent school, which she adored. 'I thought I was in a film with soft-focus lenses, with glamorous, exotic people, where the sun always shone.' It was here that she discovered her singing voice. 'I remember hitting high notes and the top of my head would start going tzztttzzzp - buzzing - and I remember grinning so much that my face would hurt, because I was so happy. It was the only thing I could do where I felt something was going on.'

But at 11, she failed the entry exam to the convent's senior school (she describes herself as thick, though in fact she's dyslexic), and she 'cried and cried and cried, and I knew it was the end of an era, that I had to go on to my next life. And then it was glue-sniffing and smoking and Tippex-thinner for the next five years.'

A strange jump, from convent to glue sniffing - but not for a drama queen like Alison. Drugs are just a short cut to emotional extremes, and Alison has never been one for the mediocre. 'I want passion and emotion.'

When Alison went to the local comp, her prevailing passion was hate: 'I hated my teachers because I knew they didn't care and I knew they had no control over me, so I hated them even more.' Even music lessons were disappointing: her class was made to listen to Jeff Wayne's pomp nonsense War of the Worlds as though it were significant. Alison went traditionally teenage - eating her shirt buttons to make herself sick, racing scramble bikes with local bad boys, cutting her hair into a mohican, tattooing her own finger, driving her parents to distraction. 'I was a nasty bit of work, awful to them. I felt terrible about it for years afterwards.'

Even now, she's still funny about the countryside: 'It can be violent and weird, you get extremes there. People think the countryside is sedate, but actually it just looks pretty. Awful things go on there and nothing gets said. Puberty is miserable and it's worse in the countryside.'

At 16 she left home, with no O-levels, no qualifications of any kind, and moved to a squat off the Old Kent Road. Her two squat-mates were male: one English, who never spoke, the other Finnish, who listened to heavy metal and read porn over breakfast. Alison had a bleached-blonde crew cut and only wore red, green and blue clothes. She worked her way through various crap jobs - telesales, greasy-spoon waitressing - all the while answering ads in Melody Maker for singers. For the next few years she drifted.

She moved to Brixton and hung around with people she met in clubs: 'not real friends, just arse-lickers and gay guys who liked a pretty girl hanging round.' Brixton was quite rough in those days, and Alison was attacked in the dole office, dragged out of phone boxes, chucked off the bus by women who didn't like the look of her. After a while, though she's not specific, she gives the impression that she was wasting time through being wasted, gradually spiralling down into depression. 'I was self-reliant, but I was very unconfident for years. A lot of people tell you in your life that you can't do things, and you believe them.'

Things got so bad that she moved to Belgium. She got a grant from the British Council to work with a contemporary dance group, and, for the first time, she worked properly on her voice and let rip. Three years of vocal experimentation later, she took an art foundation course and got into Middlesex. She sang on an Orbital track. Two women who came to see her performance art offered to manage her. Alison said no, but asked them to forward a tape of her singing to Tricky.

But, like the fairy tale she seems to want her life to be, Alison got her happy ending. It seems that now could be her time. 'Maybe I do feel that a bit. Even in the last few months people have become more open to what we're doing. For ages, it was Keane, Travis, gloomy boys with guitars. Britain does love an indie band... but there are other bands coming through now.'

Britain does: but it also gets bored easily. The past year has seen the art/gay/glam style of bands like Scissor Sisters, clubs like Nag Nag Nag and designers like House of Jazz move further into the mainstream. Plus, we love sexy eccentrics: Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Bj¿rk... yes, it could be Alison's time. That is, if she can just relax enough to make it happen. Her stop-start progress means she can't let go of the reins, loosen her grip on her controlled, controlling image; step out of her fantasies and allow us to see her out of costume.

'But you see,' she protests, 'I'm not acting when I dress up. I'm expressing myself, but also some other life. That's what it feels like. It's not a caricature, it's not fake: I just feel like it's another part of me and what I want to be and what I want to say. It's an emotional thing.'

Maybe. It's certainly arresting. But I've a feeling that Alison may find that the world appreciates the camp, chilly Wonder Woman more when she lets them see the real - warm, complicated, intelligent - Linda Carter beneath.

 
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